Computers have enjoyed, in recent years, an enormous growth in utility. Early computers allowed users to perform tasks such as word processing and bookkeeping. Today, however, computers have become everyday communication tools, fast approaching the commonness of telephones and televisions.
Much of this growth in the communications realm stems from the fantastic, compounded growth of computer networks, such as the much-heralded Internet—a worldwide network of computers interconnected through public and private wiring and telephone systems. The Internet functions as a planetary communications system, enabling users to communicate with each other, to transmit data to each other, and to search for data of particular interest.
One problem stemming from the rapid growth of the Internet concerns the time and effort often necessary to find data of particular interest. There are numerous publicly accessible search engines that continually work to index the data on the Internet and thus facilitate locating it. However, with the vast amounts of available data, these search engines often answer user queries with large amounts of irrelevant data, leaving users to spend significant time and effort sifting through it for the data, the knowledge, they actually want. Although combination search engines have been developed to allow users to simultaneously use two or more search engines, in many instances these have only presented users with even more data to sift, thus compounding the data-finding problem.
Another related problem is that the planetary scope of the Internet makes it difficult for users to find and communicate with other users who share interests in similar kinds of information. Websites, chat rooms, and forums devoted to particular topics, such as health, have emerged in recent years. However, the information shared through these websites, chat rooms, and forums is too often sparse and of poor quality, since many participants behave as spectators and do not actively contribute information. Moreover, direct competition between the websites, chat rooms, and discussion forums for users generally leads to smaller, fragmented communities of users, thwarting development of larger aggregate communities.
Accordingly, there is a need not only to reduce the time necessary to find particular types of data on the Internet, but also to facilitate development of communities of active users around specific topics and conversion of information into real knowledge.